Informer to eat 100 cattle in a week

Freedom Mutanda
THE guest who featured in our last week’s instalment of the unsung hero, Sonny Bumhira, whose war name was Kid Mawrong-wrong, said he had a story to tell concerning betrayal during his stint as a guerrilla. Readers of the column gave me feedback and below are some of their comments.

Thank you Mr Mutanda for your column…inotidzidzisa pamwe nekutirangaridza kumashure pamusoro penyika ino nechimurenga. Ndini Terence Mwedzi pa Osborne Dam.’’

Well, Terence Mwedzi, I thank you for the compliment. We can’t be a people without a history. Look, some of the western historians dispute the fact that the towering Great Zimbabwe was built by the indigenous people. It is good to hear from those men and women who decided to sacrifice everything and crossed the border to liberate Zimbabwe.

In History, we call that raw history which comes from the horse’s mouth.

Another reader wanted to confirm whether the Kid ma wrong wrong we featured was the same one who operated in the Zimunya area. He is not.

Identity is very important in any war situation but we find the callous Smith regime soldiers hunting and exterminating the families of those who went to join the Chimurenga and that called for secrecy on all those who got trained and returned to the front. It is true that war names could be similar. For example, Mabhunu Muchapera was a popular nom de guerre during the armed struggle. In that regard, Cde Kid ma wrong wrong may not be the only owner of that struggle name.

As a matter of fact, there was another guerrilla with the same war name who was killed and paraded to act as a deterrent to those who wanted to join the Chimurenga. It was well before Cde Sonny Bumhira had joined the front; it is only natural for new recruits to want to appropriate names of famous fighters. There are many Cde Mau Mau’s in Zimbabwe as a result of the Mau Mau fighters in Kenya.

Soldiers wanted to instil fear in the hearts of the Africans; thus, the parading and taking of pictures to be sent to national papers for everyone to read about them was to forestall the mass movement of young men and women to join ZANLA and ZIPRA. Propaganda may win wars and the Rhodesians were very much aware of that. Adolf Hitler famously said that if a lie is repeated often enough, it will end up being seen as the gospel truth.

In light of that Cde Sonny Bumhira, aka Cde Kid ma wrong wrong, is a bona fide war veteran whose group Sasa Mariza is well known. His stay in the Nyabadza area of Makoni is known and vetted by the relevant authorities.

At times, the Rhodesian intelligence service thought it was fighting a never ending war as comrades seemed not to die. Imagine when the soldiers heard the exploits of a new Kid Ma wrong wrong in Zimunya and another one in Makoni, striking at the same time. What will they think? How will they feel? Fear.

A snake with two heads

Cde Kid ma wrong wrong continues his tale from last week. Seeing him speak, one is reminded of a man on a mission. The war may have ended but he remembers the betrayal he suffered at the hands of a man they, as cadres, trusted the most.

My group had imbedded itself with the Nyabadza people. Earlier comrades had cemented their presence through morale boosting all-night meetings commonly known as pungwes.

During that time, the political commissars talked about the reasons why war must be waged to remove the evil regime. It was common knowledge that white farmers ill-treated their workers and the slave wages the workers earned could not dignify the African. Again, our parents wanted their children to go to school.

However, very few secondary schools were found in the Makoni area and even if a child passed, schools took just under a hundred students. Because of that, our arrival there was met with jubilation. We had heavy artillery to finish off the war.

There was a mobiliser who I am not going to mention by name. He was very good. His job was to link us with the people and the business community. Remember the principles of Mao in using the guerrilla method of fighting. We needed the people for us to succeed and the mujibhas, chimbwidos and vabereki were there to carry us through.

At the front of everything was the mobiliser. He was almost like a chief mujibha. Reconnaissance was carried out by the mobiliser. If we wanted to have pungwe meeting, he has to ensure that the povo attended and no injury visit the people.

You must appreciate that not everyone received training at the rear or in training bases. Some mujibhas and chimbwidos were trained at the front especially after they had shown total allegiance and dedication to the party constitution and the ideals of the liberation struggle. That mobiliser could easily have benefited from that in-house training had it been for an unfortunate incident.

We had been to the trenches with him. At one time, we had ambushed a white man coming from Umtali with goodies for his shop and the mobiliser executed his duties very well. His job was to wave the car down like an elderly man suffering from hunger. The white man seemed to have sensed the trick for he did not screech to a halt but in the brief seconds he slowed down, we opened fire and he collapsed under a hail of bullets. We left him there but made good our escape with the goods which would act as our provisions for some time.

In war, there has to be zero tolerance to betrayal. If betrayers are treated with kids’ gloves, a revolution will never get to its resolution. I am particularly sensitive to betrayal; three days after my arrival at Nyadzonia, I came face to face with the brutality of war. Nyati was a former commander of Zanla who turned against the revolution. For that betrayal, thousands lost their lives. That was needless killing.

Hardly a pungwe meeting ended without the commander or commissar castigating sell-outs. You would hear him say,’’Pasi ne vatengesi.’’

‘’Down with sell-outs,’’ was no idle threat. In war parlance, that word ‘’down’’ is synonymous with pronouncing the death sentence to anyone found guilty of betraying the revolution especially when the war had reached a decisive phase which may result in gaining independence. We had no patience with those who were hell bent on derailing the revolution.

Revolutions are no walks in the park; they do not require lily- livered individuals; a mistake, if it is brooked, will result in the death of many people and in our case, we are talking about the povo and the combatants.

One day, we visited the mobilizer’s place and when we got there, we were told he had gone to Umtali, modern day Mutare. As usual, we waited for food to be cooked while we talked with the family members. On that day, there was no maize meal at home. The elder sister called her younger brother to go and collect a bucket of maize from the granary. He came back running.

‘’There is a shhhh sound in the granary,’’ the boy looked as if he had seen a ghost.

We rushed into the granary and saw the walke-talkie; we all gasped in shock and horror. There was only one meaning to this sordid affair.

The mobiliser was a double agent.

We went about our business as if nothing had happened. He returned from Umtali the following day. We had a pungwe meeting at the local base. He attended it. Amazingly, he had managed to come with some goodies from Umtali and there were showers of appreciation for his noble deeds in advancing the second chimurenga.

We visited him on a Sunday. He greeted us with gladness as usual. He gave us some stools to sit. We began talking about the war and how we expected to quickly end it. It had been a long journey, we were all agreed. Then one comrade appeared to have been in a trance.

‘’Comrade Mobiliser, I hear a shhhhhh sound. Where is it coming from?’’ Cde Zvauya innocently asked.

‘’There is nothing like that,’’ the mobilizer brushed it off. However, his face had grown ashen. One could see the visible shaking of his legs and hands. We didn’t want to terrify him but he had to know that we knew.

We took him by the hand and went into the granary. We scooped out the maize that hid the walkie-talkie. By this time, he was pleading with us vehemently.” I don’t know what came over me,’’ he said.“Tell us comrade, why?’’ Our commissar asked.

Then, the mobilizer itemised the several encounters we had with the enemy and how he would use the walkie-talkie to inform the enemy about our gatherings. Inevitably, the enemy would pounce resulting in loss of lives of the povo and the comrades.

Despite the pleading, we asked him to kill and eat all the cattle within a week. The man had more than a hundred cattle.

After that, we went away and then monitored his movements for him not to escape.

We later had an all-night meeting where we explained to the povo what had happened. The mobilizer narrated how he betrayed the revolution while a chorus of ‘uhs’ and óhs’ filled the air.

He killed one ox but he could not finish eating it. We visited him and asked whether he had finished. We told him he had caused the killing of scores of people-sons and daughters of the soil.

We tied each of his legs to two oxen.

The war was not for the faint hearted.